$5,000 for Proving the Earth is a Globe (Oct, 1931)

Post and Gatty didn’t fly around the world, according to Wilbur Glenn Voliva, they merely flew in a circle around the North Pole. This article presents Voliva’s theory of a flat world, and tells you how you can win his offer of $5,000 for proving that he is wrong.

WOULD you like to earn $5,000? If you can prove that the world is a sphere, floating in space, turning on its own axis, revolving around the sun, you can earn a prize of that amount. Such a prize has been posted for years, offered by Wilbur Glenn Voliva, general overseer of Zion, 111., home of the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church, founded some thirty years ago by the late John Alexander Dowie.
Many have tried to claim the $5,000â€”and all have failed. The catch is that your proof must not start with the assumption that the world is round, or rather a globe, for Voliva believes the world is round, but a round, flat disc rather than a sphere. Without that basic premise that the earth is spherical no one has found an absolutely convincing proof that Voliva is wrong when he describes his disc-shaped world, firmly planted on its foundations, surrounded by a wall of ice to keep mariners from falling off the edge, and surmounted by a crystal dome in which the stars are hung like chandeliers to light the night. Nor can you submit proof to absolutely disprove the belief of Voliva that the sun, instead of being an 800,000 mile ball of fire more than ninety millions of miles away is really a fairly insignificant affair, only some 27 to 30 miles in diameter and about 3,000 miles above the earth. Or that the sun and moon move in orbits while the earth stands still, that the moon is about the same size as the sun and the same distance from the earth, shines by its own light, and moves in much the same orbit as the sun.

In these days of 100 and 200 inch telescopes, accurate measurement of the speed of light and the diameter of distant stars, any challenge of the correctness of the familiar Pythagorean-Copernican-Newtonian system of astronomy may come as a shock. Actually the belief that the world is flat isn’t confined to Zion. China, which had workable systems of astronomy as soon if not sooner than Greece or Egypt, continues to stick to the flat world theory, and thousands of other people scattered over the globe have this, or theories even more unusual.

Ever hear of Orlando Ferguson? Ferguson, a resident of Hot Springs, South Dakota, designed a weird and wonderful map back in 1893 which showed a square world, with an angel seated on each of the four corners. The inhabitable or known world was not, however, flat. The central section, comprising what we know as the northern hemisphere, was convex, curving downward from the central “north pole” to the equator, while the southern hemisphere was concave, curving upward from the equator to the rim. The shape was much like a soup plate with a raised center.

Then there is Gustave F. Ebding, of Cleveland, who recently published a book to prove that the world is a hollow sphere, and that we live inside it instead of on the outside, the so-called Koreshan theory of Koresh and Prof. U. G. Marrow. Then there is the theory of Marshall B. Gardner that the earth is a sphere with the inhabitants living on the outside, but that the sphere is hollow. Variations of the Gardner theory have been used often by fiction writers, who have peopled the inside with strange races and hung up a small sun in the center to illuminate it.

Compared to some of these ideas Zetetic Astronomy, or the flat world theory of Voliva and his followers at Zion, has considerable to commend it.

The three commonest proofs that the earth is a sphere were cited by Aristotle in ancient Greece 1800 years before Columbus “sold” the world on the spherical theory, and they are still in use. The mass of the people did not really begin to believe that their world was a globe until the earth had been circumnavigated. Actually that was not as good a proof as any of the three cited by Aristotle, for it is possible to circumnavigate Voliva’s flat world, traveling either east or west, and come back to the starting point,

Aristotle’s three proofs were:

First. The disappearance of a ship as it sails over the horizon, the hull vanishing first, and the masts and rigging last, and the reappearance of an approaching ship in reverse order.

Second. The curving shape of the earth’s shadow on the moon during an eclipse.

Third. The changing aspect of the heavens in different latitudes, some stars disappearing and others appearing, as the polar star in the northern hemisphere and the southern cross south of the equator.

“There is not a scintilla of truth in any of them,” Voliva retorts, “and yet you will find them in every geography, and every primary teacher repeats them like a parrot. I decline to be a parrot. A parrot is a man who never thinks for himself, but repeats what he hears without any questions as to why or wherefore.”

Zion maintains that the disappearance of a ship over a horizon hull first is an optical illusion of perspective, no different from the apparent merging of the railroad tracks in the distance. A man at the foot of a tree a couple of miles across a plain may be invisible, while the tree itself stands up against the sky and is visible for miles. Earth curvature of eight inches to the mile is not sufficient to explain the invisibility of the man.

As for Aristotle’s second point, Voliva and his followers maintain there is no proof that the curving shadow of an eclipse is the shadow of the earth, and maintain that there have been several eclipses within historical times in which both sun and moon were visible at the same time, so that the eclipse could not have, been due to the earth’s shadow.

As for the third proof, the Zionites and other believers in the Zetetic Astronomy of “Parallax” maintain that the stars are set in a hemispherical dome so low and close to the earth that not all stars can be visible from any one point. Dr. Samuel B. Rowbottom, of England, who, under the name of “Parallax” provided the explanations for all natural phenomena to fit the flat world theory, died in 1884, but his followers have kept his work alive.

The flat world theory is not confined to any country, sect or group. Within recent years the Rev. John Dmich, a Catholic priest, has written a book “The Earth Is Not Round” which has had a wide sale. Another pamphlet, “One Hundred Proofs that the Earth is not a Globe”, issued by William Carpenter in 1885, the year after Rowbottom’s death, continues to appear in revised editions. A book by Alexander Gleason, issued in 1893, is a standard text book among the Zetetic believers. Gleason also issued the map which is used in the parochial school at Zion, where the flat world theory is taught as fact, and the spherical world belief covered only as an incidental superstition.

The Gleason map, a copy of J. S. Christopher’s projection, shows the world as a disc, with the north pole in the center and the south polar regions spread as a wall of ice around the rim. The northern hemisphere is more nearly correct in this form than on the standard Mercator projection generally used in schools, for navigation and for other purposes. The southern hemisphere, however, is enormously distorted.

Australia, for example, is drawn out as an enormously long and narrow island. Chester M. Shippey, director of research in Voliva’s church cabinet, admits this is one of the weaknesses of the flat world theory, for the time table of the Australian trans-continental railroad shows a mileage far less than the Christopher map would call for.

Voliva maintains that there is no South Pole, and that it is 60,000 miles around the southern ice wall. Captain Gunnar Isachsen, the Norwegian explorer, last winter circumnavigated the Antarctic continent in a voyage of about 14,000 miles. Zion says Isachsen may have circumnavigated something, possibly an island of that size, but did not go around the antarctic ice rim, and points to the 60,000 mile journey of Ross in 1848 and the following two years, when he circumnavigated the ice rim. Of course Ross was in a sailing ship which tacked back and forth for three years on a journey Isachsen completed in a few weeks, which could explain the discrepancy in the distance traveled.

“They say that Byrd flew over the South Pole,” Voliva said recently, “but there is no South Pole. East, west and south are not absolute directions; they are only relative directions with reference to north. East and west are points at right angles to north.”

Voliva maintains that the sun is not more than 30 miles in diameter and about 3,000 miles from the earth. As proof he points to the fact that on March 21-22 the sun is directly overhead at the equator and appears 45 degrees above the horizon at 45 degrees north and south latitude. As the angle of sun above the earth at the equator is 90 degrees while it is 45 degrees at 45 degrees north or south latitude, it follows that the angle at the sun between the vertical from the horizon and the line from the observers at 45 degrees north and south must also be 45 degrees. The result is two right angled triangles with legs of equal length. The distance between the equator and the points at 45 degrees north or south is approximately 3,000 miles, so the sun would be an equal distance above the equator, and, from the apparent size of the sun’s image, it would follow that it has a diameter of about 30 miles.

Of course, if one starts with the assumption that the world is a sphere instead of a flat surface, the same facts can be used to prove that the sun is nearly 93,000,000 miles away, and has a diameter of more than 800,000 miles.

Voliva argues that if the sun were that big and at that distance there would be no change of seasons because the sun’s rays would reach both hemispheres with equal volume regardless of its position north or south in relation to the equator. On the other hand the same argument can be used to prove that on his flat world there could be no seasons, and no period of total darkness at the north pole. Actually, of course, the amount of the sun’s rays reaching the earth is radically reduced by the envelope of air and moisture, without which, in fact, life would be impossible, because days would be unbearably hot and nights impossibly cold, just as they are on the moon and some of the planets. Prof. Piccard, the German balloonist, found a temperature of about 72 below zero outside his airtight balloon car at an altitude of ten miles, while inside it the temperature was 104 degrees above zero. If the flat world believers deny the absorption factor of moisture and air in the round world theory they have removed the only argument that could explain seasonal changes and polar nights in their flat world.

Some of the claimants of Voliva’s $5,000 prize have argued that, because the moon and the planets appear to be spheres it must follow that the earth is a sphere, an assumption which Voliva and his followers deny. That, says Voliva, is like arguing that because a cow is an animal and has horns, all animals have horns, or that all cows have horns.

Probably the best spherical world proofs ever found were the two discovered by Jean Bernard Leon Foucault, the famous French engineer, when he invented the Foucault pendulum and the gyroscope. The performance of both can only be explained on the assumption that the earth is a sphere, revolving on its axis, but they do not prove the fact within the meaning of Voliva’s prize offer. The Foucault pendulum illustrates the diurnal motion of the earth as it revolves on its axis, the plane of the oscillation of the freely suspended pendulum slowly changing until it appears to make one revolution each day.

The gyroscope has the same property. If a gyroscope is set spinning on the equator with its spinning axis horizontal in an east

and west direction it will appear to make one revolution a day about an axis at right angles to the spinning axis. At the end of twelve hours the gyroscope will appear to have reversed ends, though actually it will continue to point just as it did at the start, only the earth will have made a half revolution. Also, if a spinning gyroscope were carried around the earth along a north and south meridian, passing over the two poles, it would constantly change its angle so that the horizontal spinning axis would always be at right angles to a vertical line from the earth’s center. In other words, if the gyroscope were at 50 degrees north latitude, the gyro axle would be at an angle to the earth’s axis equal to the degree of latitude, or 50 degrees, and also at an equal angle to a line passing through the center of the gyroscope and parallel to the polar axle of the earth.

The performance of the gyroscope and pendulum can only be explained by the assumption that the earth is a revolving sphere.

Much of the Zetetic “proofs” of the world’s flatness consist of attacks on the spherical theory. For example Voliva and his followers argue that an airplane pilot traveling 300 miles an hour would have to “fall” 60,000 feet an hour in order to maintain his altitude above a spherical world and keep from shooting out in space. Of course, they deny the existence of gravity, and the fact that an airplane maintaining a constant distance from the earth’s center is neither falling nor rising. But also the formula on which they calculate the rate of “fall” is not true.

The formula is based on the well known fact that the earth’s curvature is eight inches in one mile. In other words if three stakes of equal length are set up on water, at distances of one mile, and a sight is taken over the tops of the two end stakes, two miles apart, it will pass eight inches below the top of the middle stake, one mile away. But the Volivalites go on to calculate that the “drop” increases as the square of the distance, and therefore that distance squared, multiplied by eight and divided by twelve will give the drop from the horizon in feet for any distance. Actually there is no formula in spherical trigonometry which can be used to calculate such a spherical triangle for any desired distance. That can be proven very easily by any one who knows plane geometry, for it requires no knowledge of trigonometry to show the error in the formula. If you draw a circle, with its equator and the vertical meridian, giving the north and south poles, and then draw a horizon line at the north pole, you can prove the fact. A flyer starting from the north pole and traveling to the equator, would cover 6,000 miles if the globe is 24,000 miles in circumference. The diameter of a 24,000 mile globe is 7,639.69 miles, and the radius is 3,819.845 miles, so the “drop” from the horizon of the north pole would be the same.

But according to the Zion formula, if you square the distance of the flight, 6,000 miles, you get 36,000,000, multiply that by 8 (the curvature per mile) and you have 288 million, divide by 12 to get the feet, gives 24 million, and divide that again by 5280 to get the miles, and the answer is 4545.45 miles, or an error of more than 725 miles. To have the drop which the Zion formula indicates the earth would have to have a diameter of more than 28,588 miles.

The Zion formula also makes no provision for angles in the negative or positive sense, as measured in trigonometry, and if the flyer kept on past the half way mark it would show the drop continuing to increase, instead of decreasing, until, if he returned to his starting point, the formula would show him to be 72,935 miles away in space.

The Voliva prize probably will remain uncollected unless some future space traveler some day anchors his ship a few thousand miles out in space and takes a movie of a globular world turning on its axis. That seems to be the only way the $5,000 can ever be collected.

Very interesting article… The State of Florida established a State Historic Site at Estero, which is where Cyrus Teed (Koresh – Hebrew for Cyrus) set up his “utopia” The park is there because the Koreshan were true pioneers in south Florida, not because of their beliefs. We have an “unofficial” site at http://koreshan.mwweb.o…

sam says: August 14, 20077:01 pm

That article made me chuckle a good bit. Awesome find! 😀

incubus says: November 15, 20077:26 pm

Yeah nice article, just goes to show people will believe anything they want regardless of reality.

thousand miles out in space and takes a movie of a globular world turning on its axis.

What do you know someone (Apollo astronauts) have already done just that, guess none of those flat earth society peeps bothered to check since the 1600s. 🙁

If you go to the top of a high mountain you can see the curvature of the earth. Then, all you need is some trigometry and a knowledge of just how far your reference points are from the mountain.

john Ingles says: December 4, 200711:34 pm

also if you don’t believe that then read up on the force of gravity and the fact that a mass the size of earth has so much gravity that it is required by physical law to assume the shape of an almost perfect sphere.

Anonymous says: December 12, 200710:11 am

The best part of this was the advertisements.

Mart says: March 7, 200811:59 pm

Definition of FE’er (Flat Earther) by a RE’er (Round Earther)
FE’er: The World is Flat
RE’er: Why then, as a ship sails away in a calm sea, does it appears to fall below the HORIZON, explain
FE’er: It doesn’t, it just gets smaller, like railway lines appearing to merge in the distance
RE’er: Get a telescope and look for the ship (you will at some point see just the top half of the ship)
FE’er: Telescopes are a conspiracy
RE’er: Thought you’d say that

RE’er: Why can you not see MT Everest from MT Kilimanjaro with a Telescope (4000 miles away)
FE’er: Answer a) Telescopes are a conspiracy, Answer b) MT Everest is a hoax (Filmed on a sound stage)
RE’er: Yeah i’m spotting a pattern here

Basically anything that disagrees with their theory MUST be a conspiracy. Even Physics, Geology and Astronomy

Right then time for facts not delusions:
GPS uses a minimum of 4 reference points (satelites) to calculate your exact location ‘ON A SPHERE’ by means of elementary triangulation , and using this navigation method people have, on many occasions flown directly South over the S.Pole (sorry – ‘Wall Of Ice’ to all you FE’ers). And guess what happened – Nothing, apart from the compass and GPS now stated that they were now heading North as expected. So theres nothing stopping someone chartering a flight to take some pictures of this ‘Ice Wall’ and the Edge of the World. We have plenty of proof for a spherical planet, yet somehow no pictures to support a flat one.

Question: have you ever flown on a plane at dusk. If you fly east the Sun sets quicker if you fly west it sets slower (if you fly west fast enough, you can even make it rise again) – this is solid proof that the earth is rotating in a westerly direction (and when i say the Sun sets I DO NOT mean it gets smaller as you FE’ers would have us believe – I quite obviously mean it gradually drops below the HORIZON whilst maintaining its apparent size).

Consider this question, Why do engineers build bridges with support towers that lean away from each other at the top – Answer: they dont – they stand them upright and the curvature of the earth does the rest – dont take my word for it – get a spirit level and a long tapemeasure and see for yourself. Or are bridges part of the conspiracy too. Come on now – give up – open your eyes and stop being stubborn.

So the Definition of a Flat Earther is someone who when confronted with a truth they don’t like/understand, just throws all known laws of reason, not to mention physics out of the window. They attempt to hide/discredit what might upset their whole belief system. Honestly I’m not a conspiritor – These are just the facts, If it looks like a sphere, behaves like a sphere and all rational tests prove its a sphere – Then it’s a bloody sphere, ok, lol

Basically FE’er are telling US not to believe the COMMON SENSE we have been taught, just because it’s too complex for THEM to comprehend. For me its pretty simple, if you want to see a Spherical Earth then just get Google Earth, and for all you stubborn Flat Earthers theres always Google maps 😉

The world is a round sphere I will give you no argument there. But not rotating. I believe there is a heat resistant core turning, and a liquid sea of magma also turning. But this does not create the momentum to turn the earth around it. rather it creates a pull (Gravity) on all that is around it much like the old dropping floor amusement park ride only the exact opposite force. rather than pushing you away as the ride does it pulls you in like a whirlpool. The airspace above ground is confined by an outer ring of space that also turns the blackness of space is in motion around our earth and exerts a pulling force of its own. It is these opposite pulls that keep our airspace confined and unable to mix. This has to do with the composition of our airspace and the lack of similar components in the blackness of space.
At one time God allowed this force to slow down enough to drop an outer ring of water onto the earth thus flooding the globe quickly with a deluge. This outer ring of water allowed the gloge to experience identical temperatures everywhere. This is supported by archaeological finds in frozen tundras of elephants, exotic plants and trees etc.
If we turn at roughly 1000 plus miles per hour in one direction, then any wind travelling in the opposite direction of earths rotation would therfore have to be going 1000 MPH plus its own windspeed in order to successfully push against earths natural airspeed. If airplanes can travel the same speed in either direction give or take 100 MPH for Jet stream then the air above us could not possibly be in motion at the same speed as the earth or planes could never fly west.
Ever wonder why (if science is correct) that the position of star to star never changes yet some stars are milions of light years away from one another in distance from the earth. When you walk in a continuous direction and look at the same points to your right or left the objects that are closer move away from your line of sight quickly but the objects at a greater distance tend to stay where they are and the ratio of nearer objects to farther objects which cause this result are less than the distance ratios of the stars? There is much more but I will go for now.

Proof that the earth is round can be solved with airflight distances and shedules. Flight estimates from Buenos Aires to Melbourne Australia are based on 7238 miles of flight.
From Melbourne to Hong Kong they are 11,480 miles of flight. clearly if the map of earth above is correct you should be able to reach Hong Kong from Melbourne well before a flight from Melbourne to Buenos aires. But the plane is obviously taking advantage of the closer proximity of Melbourne to Buenos Aires by travelling off the edge of the earth. lol

The part about flying off the edge of the earth I am joking about, hence the lol at the end of my comment. I do think I have proven the earth to be round though with a simple flight reference. Now where’s the 5 G’s?

Charlie says: April 8, 200812:13 pm

Um, no, you didn’t. Your theory about airplanes not being able to fly west is wrong. Relative to the center of the earth everything is rotating at roughly the same speed. The ground, the air AND the plane. So by your example, a plane flying west is really just slowing down by 500mph.

I’m not sure what you’re trying to say about the distances to stars, but we do get a very small parallax on near by start at different times on the year (depending on where the earth is in it’s orbit around the sun). Distant stars do have a parallax, it’s just too small for us to measure.

So if everything is rotating at the same speed earth,ground and air from west to east how can a hurricane travel west off the Atlantic towards the Coast? It must first travel 1000 MPH before it can move against the wind effect of the earths rotation same with planes, the reason they encounter no resistance is there is no 1000 MPH rotation. And while we are on that subject if the earths equator and the poles are experiencing an equivalent rotation then why wouldn’t the poles turn 360 degrees more frequently than the massive center of earth? Spin a globe and count how many rotations at the ends versus rotations at the center.

And the $5,000 is for proving the earth is a Sphere not flat! My explanation of plane travel distances was meant to prove that. My argument about a rotating earth is another discussion entirely.

Anne says: April 8, 20081:51 pm

The poles make a complete turn at exactly the same rate as the equator. Take a globe with latitude and longitude marked, spin it and watch that 0 degrees longitude makes a complete circle at exactly the same time no matter what latitude you’re at.

As far as hurricanes go, that’s another matter entirely. For simplification purposes, the Earth rotates just slightly faster than the atmosphere surrounding it. So while they’re both going east to west, the hurricane is traveling at a slightly slower speed and that’s what makes them veer into places like Florida instead of Africa. That’s a gross, gross oversimplification but it’s essentially how things work.

The poles make a complete turn at exactly the same rate as the equator. Take a globe with latitude and longitude marked, spin it and watch that 0 degrees longitude makes a complete circle at exactly the same time no matter what latitude youâ€™re at.

Correct but the centrifugal forces at the equator would be enormous by comparison to the poles.

I have been on websites that discuss in great detail the scientific,mathematical explanation for everything from black hole theory to gravity theory and back. We cant cure AIDS,cancer,diabetes,M.S.,Autism…….the list goes on, but we can supposedly measure the distance to Andromeda Galaxy, The precise heat of the suns outer surface and inner core. Please! They cant even actually land on the moon, if they could they would do it again now, but they wont because far too many people have wised up to this nonsense and have the equipment to catch the fabrication of written and filmed information. I suggest that the eath does not turn, yes it goes against everything we have been taught but what if i could prove to you, there is a cure for AIDS,Cancer, EBola, alzheimers and many others, you would then I hope begin to question the information we are fed.

This guy is totally right. The earth isn’t round. Neither are the other planets we can see in the sky. They only look round because of a complex optical illusion that involves infrared rays.

brian says: July 15, 200812:08 pm

What is being promoted as a flat world surrounded by a planetarium type sky is reminiscent of the movie Truman. A very scary sci-fi meets reality T.V. show aimed at fooling 1 person, but in this case billions. I don’t buy it. On a flat earth the sun would be visible at all times and if it was not then all areas of the earth would be dark at the same time. The only way to have the sun set and rise is if it falls below the horizon. It cant do that on a flat earth and still light the earth from below the edge of a supposed flat earth.

Absolutely!!!!!
It is presently responding to a thread on the shape of the world with a cleverly placed diversion question on simple cells.

JMyint says: September 24, 20087:12 pm

The reason that many people cannot accept the things that science has discovered is because if those thing are true then they really a insignificant in the scope of the universe. Each person is just one of six and a half billion individuals living on a small planet, orbiting a medeocre star, at the edge of an average galaxy that is one of tens of billions of galaxies. Life is short and brutal and in a thousand years nobody will care about anything you did.

So have a good time, learn something, do something for yourself, do something for someone else.

jayessell says: September 25, 20089:19 am

? …and everything you thought was so important doesn’t matter… ?

JMyint says: September 25, 20082:29 pm

Really as long as you meet your basic needs, and enough wants to be relatively comfortable what else is there? Few people could tell you what the issues in the 1908 election were. Even though that was a year of economic crisis and a bail out of the stock market. That was only 100 years ago.

People just don’t like to be reminded that in the grand scheme if the sun were to go into super nova tomorrow the rest of the universe would barely take notice.

brian says: September 25, 20082:58 pm

I posted this in April, and honestly I believe I deserve the $5,000.00 this is a scam!
#

Proof that the earth is round can be solved with airflight distances and shedules. Flight estimates from Buenos Aires to Melbourne Australia are based on 7238 miles of flight.
From Melbourne to Hong Kong they are 11,480 miles of flight. clearly if the map of earth above is correct you should be able to reach Hong Kong from Melbourne well before a flight from Melbourne to Buenos aires. But the plane is obviously taking advantage of the closer proximity of Melbourne to Buenos Aires by travelling off the edge of the earth. lol

Comment by brian — April 7, 2008 @ 3:37 pm
refute the above logic without including every pilot in the world in on a cover-up silence conspiracy.

Richard C says: October 2, 20084:02 pm

The problem with the flight schedule proof is that it violates the rules set out in the article. The article said the proof couldn’t start by assuming the roundness of the earth. The people who based the schedules on 7238 miles of flight for Buenos Aires to Melbourne and 11,480 miles from Melbourne to Hong Kong were obviously making the very reasonable assumption of a more-or-less spherical Earth. While that’s a reasonable assumption to make if you’re setting flight schedules, it’s a prohibited assumption under the rules of this contest. Thus, your proof fails to win the prize. Thanks for playing.

I’m sure they were presented with other attempts at least as logical as the flight schedule attempt, and I’m sure they denied them.

Arkady says: October 17, 200812:31 am

The problem with most of these pseudoscientific theories, like Brian’s, is that they rely on qualitative analysis as opposed to quantitative analysis. To phrase it another way they have no calculations to back them up and instead rely on obfuscation and sophistry. For instance Brian brought up the point of centripetal force at the equator, while never providing an exact figure. I took the few seconds required to work it out and the standard formula for centripetal acceleration results in {(v^2)/r} ={(465.11 m/s)^2}/6378100 m = .0339 m/s^2 acceleration at the equator compared to a gravitational acceleration of 9.8 m/s^2.

[…] for proving that the Earth is spherical. Within the posted terms, the challenge turned out to be no easy cake. A solid proof outside of the challenge, though, lies with Foucualt’s pendulum and […]

ZLostAlien says: December 19, 20087:25 am

It is very difficult to understand what anybody else’s experience is. There
aren’t enough words to really understand what anybody else is living.
Physical beings want things to be the same. They want people to think the
same. You work rather hard at sameness, but you will never win that
battle, because from Nonphysical, diversity is known to be the most
beneficial part of the game.

Excerpted from a workshop in Maui, HI on Sunday, December 14th, 1997

All Is Well

Esther said to us, “Abraham, how come you guys (meaning nonphysical
entities) can’t get your stories straight? This one says this. That one
says that. If we have been talking to God, why doesn’t God say the same
thing to everyone? Why isn’t everybody getting the same message?” And we
said, “Everybody isn’t asking the same question. Everybody is not at the
same point of understanding. Everybody is not even wanting the same
thing.” We are all about eternalness which means we are about difference.
It is in our difference that desires of all kinds come forth, and as all
of these new desires pop up, every one of them, even in their difference,
is important.

Excerpted from a workshop in Chicago, IL on Saturday, July 11th, 1998

All Is Well

Rest seems like a nice contrast to overwhelment, but enthusiasm is always
chosen over rest. The only thing that ever makes you tired or bogs you
down is resistance.

Excerpted from a workshop in Lincroft, NJ on Tuesday, October 15th, 1996

I’m not extremely millionaire, but might not need $ 1 million to make a counter-proposal on the flat earth theory.
And I do it with confidence that nobody can prove that the earth is flat with real evidence, verifiable and irrefutable.
No theory, physical evidence, eg photos of the wall on the edge of the world, photographs of the earth at high altitude, proving that the earth is flat, time and distance measurements using instruments that demonstrate the real distance to the sun or moon; measurements to show that the flat-earth maps are correct, or any other idea.
I’m even willing to finance a project, because there is no better way to show that something is false to assume that is true and get a contradiction.
Hear proposals …[email protected]…

Okay, this is 7 years after the fact, but I just have to clarify on this one poster “Mark” and his idiotic comment:

“Mart says: March 7, 2008
11:59 pm

Definition of FE’er (Flat Earther) by a RE’er (Round Earther)
FE’er: The World is Flat
RE’er: Why then, as a ship sails away in a calm sea, does it appears to fall below the HORIZON, explain
FE’er: It doesn’t, it just gets smaller, like railway lines appearing to merge in the distance
RE’er: Get a telescope and look for the ship (you will at some point see just the top half of the ship)
FE’er: Telescopes are a conspiracy
RE’er: Thought you’d say that”

Whoa whoa whoa. Just a minute here. “Get a telescope and look for the ship (you will at some point see just the top half of the ship). This is completely false. You can zoom in on a ship that has COMPLETELY “disappeared” over the horizon to the naked eye yet zoom in and clearly see the hull down to ocean floor. Apparently this fool then goes on to say that his only counter argument would be claiming that telescopes are a conspiracy? How ironic. That one “sinking ship” fallacy actually goes in favor of a flat Earth model.

You can also take a laser pointer a foot above the surface and shine it across a body of water 6 miles away and have the light reach a camera completely unperturbed by the protruding mass of globular water you would expect from a spherical Earth model. Go ahead and do these experiments and prove it to yourself.

Further:

“RE’er: Why can you not see MT Everest from MT Kilimanjaro with a Telescope (4000 miles away)
FE’er: Answer a) Telescopes are a conspiracy, Answer b) MT Everest is a hoax (Filmed on a sound stage)”

What an idiotic question. At best, high altitude line of sight through the tangential atmosphere in ideal weather and clean air extends to about 200 miles. What if I asked this asshole to put on a pair of goggles and tell me what he sees 100 miles through the ocean?

This is my favorite:

“So the Definition of a Flat Earther is someone who when confronted with a truth they don’t like/understand, just throws all known laws of reason, not to mention physics out of the window. They attempt to hide/discredit what might upset their whole belief system.”

Well, I confronted him with truths he doesn’t like or understand. Will he throw away all known laws of reason, not to mention physics out the window? Or attempt to hide/discredit the fact that what he was taught to believe is nowhere near the whole picture of what is actually here?